“Yes; I am curiously drawn to that young man. Why, I do not know; but, from the frequent conversations I have had with him, he seems very honest and good-hearted, whereas your handsome Greek is, I am convinced, a worthless scamp.”
“Well, we will see how your predictions are fulfilled. But I must be off,” continued Maurice, glancing at his watch, “it is past one o’clock. Will you not come over to luncheon with me?”
“What! and leave my roses, which need water in this hot sun! Go away, sir, and don’t ask impossibilities.”
Maurice laughed and went away, while the Rector returned to his roses, and thought over the interview. He was doubtful as to the result of Maurice’s quest for a wife, but, knowing the sterling good sense and honorable nature of his pupil, judged it best to let him take his own way.
“Everyman must dree his weird,” said Carriston, watering-pot in hand. “However this journey turns out, it will do Maurice good, for if it does not gain him a wife, it will at least banish the evil spirit which is spoiling his youth.”
Meanwhile the object of this soliloquy was striding up the avenue of the Grange at a rapid pace, and whistling gayly, out of sheer light-heartedness. Never before had he felt so happy, a circumstance which suddenly made him pause in his lilting, as he thought of the saying of an old Scotch nurse.
“I hope I am not fey,” he said to himself; “surely this joy does not prognosticate sorrow. No; I will not look on it in that gloomy light. I am going in search of Helen,—Cœlebs in search of a wife,—and if I find her as lovely as she seems to be, why, then”—
And he began whistling again, from sheer inability to express his feelings in cold, measured words. As he neared the house, the rich tenor voice of Caliphronas rang vibrating through the still air. His song was, as usual, one of those Greek fragments he was so fond of singing, and even the modern Greek tongue, debased as it was by centuries of foreign influences, sounded pliable and liquid as the vowelled words soared upward like swift-darting swallows. How bare and bleak seems the translation, bereft of its Hellenic sonorousness of speech!—
“I will sail in a beakèd ship, impelled by rowers,
Over the waters to westward, where Helios sinks nightly in splendor,